Ubuntu 8.04 And My Tablet
Published May 11th, 2008 in LinuxI had a few quirky things happen when I upgraded from Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) to 8.04 (Hardy Heron). One was sudo not working. It complained about my hosts file, which was weird but I fixed it by used “gksudo gedit,” since I couldn’t use “regular” sudo to get to it. The other major problem was my that my Genius MousePen 8×6 Graphics Tablet quit working.
I had previously followed a great tablet tutorial and everything worked perfectly. After the upgrade, the tablet essentially quit working. Apparently, the problem was related to changes in XOrg 7.3. I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ll sum up what I learned by reading through this huge thread about it. This assumes you followed the original tutorial.
Replace the old driver with the new one (precompiled for Hardy i386 or by compiling your own from source). Make sure that you remove both copies of the old one if you put it in two locations (e.g., “/usr/lib/xorg/modules/” and the “input” directory there); just put a copy of the new one in the input directory.
sudo rm /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/wizardpen_drv.so
sudo rm /usr/lib/xorg/modules/wizardpen_drv.so
wget http://specificcrap.arbitrarycrap.com/wizardpen_drv.so
sudo mv wizardpen_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/
Make a backup of your current xorg.conf:
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak
Open the xorg.conf for editing in your favorite editor (use gedit if you don’t know vim):
sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf
#or
gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Make sure that the input device for your tablet has the mode set to “absolute” and comment out (by adding “#” to the front of the line) any of the CorePointer or SendCoreEvents options. Your ServerLayout section should enable the tablet using the identifier from the tablet’s InputDevice section and set “SendCoreEvents,” e.g.:
InputDevice "WizardPen Tablet" "SendCoreEvents"
Save the changes and close the file. Now you can restart X (ctrl+alt+backspace). It works… hopefully. Be sure to configure GIMP and any other apps that you’ll need the tablet for. You may encounter some problems….
If tablet tip causes “middle” clicking: Make sure you do not have the “Emulate3Buttons” option enabled anywhere in your xorg.conf.
If you can’t “drag” in GIMP: Make sure your mouse’s InputDevice section sets the device to a specific mouse and not the generic mice input (e.g., it could be “/dev/input/mouse2″ rather than “/dev/input/mice”). If you’re unsure which mouse it should be, you can start with mouse0 and work your way up. Restart X after each change. For me, 0 disabled the mouse and 1 prevented me from logging in. Use ctrl+alt+f1 to switch to a terminal and change the device if you run into trouble and ctrl+alt+f9 to switch back to X (be sure to restart it after making changes).
Other problem: Try running cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep Tablet to see if you have any errors.
Here are the relevant chunks of my xorg.conf:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mouse2"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "WizardPen Tablet"
Driver "wizardpen"
Option "Mode" "absolute"
Option "Device" "/dev/tablet-event"
Option "TopX" "826"
Option "TopY" "2626"
Option "BottomX" "32747"
Option "BottomY" "32762"
Option "MaxX" "32747"
Option "MaxY" "32762"
Option "TopZ" "35"
Option "BottomZ" "511"
EndSection
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen "screen0"
InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"
InputDevice "Configured Mouse"
InputDevice "WizardPen Tablet" "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection
Thank you for your post. I was finally able to figure out how to get the pen to work………. Mostly. I guess I’m doomed to always having some drawbacks. The mouse that came with the pen isn’t working so well, but that’s not a big deal to me. What I am concerned about is that the scrolling on my laptop mouse has stopped functioning. Any ideas on how to correct that? I’m on an acer aspire 3690. It’s funny, it didn’t work on Windows, but then I switched to Ubuntu, and have grown so accustomed to it. Now it seems like everything is so much more work with out it. It’s a catch 22. I’d really like it to work, but I also want to keep my pen tablet working.
At any rate, thanks for saving my pen!
Glad I could mostly help. From what I’ve read, support for the tablet mouse is nil; I’ve never even used it myself. If it’s the scroll wheel on your other mouse that is having trouble, the main setting to look at is
Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5″
Make sure that’s set in the relevant input device section. If it is and restarting X doesn’t work, you can try other numbers (6, 7 is fairly common). If that doesn’t work and you’re willing to try a stronger solution, you can make a backup copy of your xorg.conf as it is now with the tablet working and then run
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
That will recreate the xorg.conf and hopefully make the scroll wheel work. If it succeeds, you can compare the file it generated with the one you saved (that has your tablet working) and see if you can track down which setting is different/missing.
Still cann’t get it working after changing the drivers and editing the xorg.conf file. And for a beginner, I don’t know where to start troubleshooting.
Check if the logs are showing anything helpful:
cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep Tablet
If not, it’s pretty hard to figure out where to start. You can always make a backup of your xorg.conf, delete the driver, and “sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” to essentially start from scratch.
Well, I just got my new laptop, also a budget Acer, and had to figure out the process of getting this thing to work. Much easier this time around. The thing that was getting me was not changing the mouse #. I do have an issue with the pen periodically drawing slower than my hand moving– Consequently screwing up my pictures. Do you have any ideas on this?
thanks
My first guess would be that you’re maxing out the processor. I always keep the system monitor graphs showing on my panel (right click on the panel, add to panel…, system monitor, add), but you can use gnome-system-monitor or top to keep an eye on system resources. If the processor is being maxed, check if anything else is using a chunk of the processor and close it if possible. You may just have to zoom in a little and use smaller brushes. My desktop has a particularly rough time with the healing tool in GIMP, so I end up working much more slowly and with a smaller brush (”[" and "]” allow you to quickly change brush sizes in GIMP). It can be frustrating sometimes, but it’s much better than the hand cramps I get when trying to be precise for too long with the mouse.